Oil and natural gas wells often utilize wellbore components or tools that, due to their function, are only required to have limited service lives that are considerably less than the service life of the well. After a component or tool service function is complete, it must be removed or disposed of in order to recover the original size of the fluid pathway for use, including hydrocarbon production, CO2 sequestration, etc. Disposal of components or tools has conventionally been done by milling or drilling the component or tool out of the wellbore, which are generally time consuming and expensive operations.
Recently, in order to improve well operations and reduce costs by reducing the need for milling or drilling operations, various interventionless, selectively removable wellbore components or tools have been developed. These selectively removable components or tools include or are formed from various dissolvable, degradable, corrodible, or otherwise removable materials and can be removed from a wellbore without mechanical intervention, such as by changing the conditions in the wellbore, including the temperature, pressure or chemical constituent makeup of a wellbore fluid. While these materials are very useful, it is also very desirable that these materials be lightweight and have high strength, including a strength comparable to that of conventional engineering materials used to form wellbore components or tools, such as various grades of steel, stainless steel and other Ni-base, Co-base and Fe-base alloys. As an example, Fe-base selectively removable materials have been developed. These Fe-base removable materials are high strength and have an ultimate compressive strength of about 100 ksi at room temperature and a density of about 5.3 g/cm3. While very useful, these materials are not ideal for use in certain applications, such as in horizontal portions of the wellbore, because they are more dense than the wellbore fluids and have a tendency to settle out of the fluid requiring higher fluid pressures to affect their movement or run-in into horizontal portions of the wellbore
While it is very desirable to use selectively removable components and tools in all portions of a well, selectively removable components and tools are particularly desirable for use in horizontal portions of the well, since a single vertical well may include a plurality of horizontal portions at a given depth, and this plurality of horizontal portions may be established at a plurality of depths. The extensive and expanding use of horizontal drilling makes the development of improved high strength, lightweight, selectively removable materials very desirable.
Thus, the further improvement of high strength, lightweight, selectively removable materials and articles, including downhole tools and components, is very desirable.